


Transatlanticism

by but_seriously



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, touches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 06:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24450019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/but_seriously/pseuds/but_seriously
Summary: "This is the way it always ends up: I’m drunk, you’re stuck, we’re in love, and then we are not.”No, Caroline is not in Paris. No, Caroline is not in Paris to see Klaus. And no, Caroline most certainly isn't having cold feet about her wedding.
Relationships: Caroline Forbes/Klaus Mikaelson
Comments: 22
Kudos: 122





	Transatlanticism

**Author's Note:**

> Canon-divergent Season 8 TVD, except a LOT of things change for the second half of the season, obvs.
> 
> I think what frustrates me the most about this story is that I've been sitting on it for more than six years, only for me to delete the entirety of the second part and re-write the ending, on a whim. You probably would've liked the first ending better, but... this seemed better. More fitting.
> 
> I initially wasn't going to post this, but at the urgings of the wonderful [LynyrdLionheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LynyrdLionheart/pseuds/LynyrdLionheart), [goldcaught](http://goldcaught.tumblr.com) and fleshandbonetelephone, here I am.
> 
> Don't mind me just clearing out my WIP folder.

**Transatlanticism;**

I.

By the time Caroline had touched down in Paris, summer had tucked in its furls and its heat, and she hums her panic away, because now she can’t blame her warming cheeks on anyone but herself. Klaus is standing there looking like something the wind blew in. The city glimmering in a lazy golden haze behind him, leaves rustling along the street collected from the feet of trees hardening up for the cold, his smile cutting through the chill of the evening towards her— reaching, reaching, reaching.

It all looks like a movie, she has time to think, before she is swept up in him.

—

And he is everywhere; she closes her eyes and she breathes in and she can _feel_ him in the room, which is impossible, really, to be able to physically feel someone’s presence like a touch lingering on your skin, but it is the way that it is.

Klaus lingers, and she hates that—hates that she can feel him lingering, right there, just out of reach.

Like a dagger in your heart, or maybe a wound that won’t heal. She might be forever scarred.

He doesn’t ask her how her flight was and she is glad for that, because any sort of small talk would make the situation that much more awkward, so what he is doing is what he always does. He shows her art. He feeds her food. There is music wafting through his apartment, muffled, something low and tinkly and pretty and sad, she decides.

“But why are you sad?” she asks before she can stop herself, and Klaus stops mid-sentence about controversies of Renaissance art, but he doesn’t answer immediately.

“Because, Caroline,” and he says her name carefully, like he has just met her, tucking away her name somewhere delicate inside him. But they’d never just _met,_ had they? She’d never had to introduce herself to him, nor himself to her. “Because I can’t touch you.”

“Says who?” she breathes.

“Says, well—”

He gestures. She looks.

Her engagement ring.

Right.

Nothing more is mentioned of it, of course. But Klaus being Klaus, and Klaus being _transparent_ , one of the marvellously, brilliantly odd things about him – he can fool an army, seduce a witch, manipulate stars and moons alike, but he can never quite mask the hunger in his eyes whenever he looks at her, can he?

She can’t pretend it doesn’t make her feel beautiful, struck up with stars.

She can’t pretend it doesn’t make her feel awful, too far away to reach.

—

And so it goes.

He shows her every inch of the city, made ugly with his recollections of bloodshed and destruction, made beautiful with his tales of its rebirth. It’s not what she’s expected, which is what she’d expected.

Stained-glass too ancient for her to fathom paints her in colours that could almost be described as divine; she stands there for an hour just staring at the way the colours change on her skin. Klaus never hurries her. Disciple of beauty that he is, he’s probably writing sonnet sin his head, pinning the lines of her down in memory so he can render her in charcoal later.

He won’t touch her, but he’ll draw her, and she’s not sure why she takes that so personally.

—

“Sometimes, ridiculous as it sounds, I do like to pretend that we stood a chance,” Klaus allows himself to say one night, and she knows he allows this because he is drunk, because that is his excuse, and she does not have any because she has not touched her wine. “In many of those moments, in many of those worlds, we end up together, but sometimes…” He grins something churlish, wet from his whiskey, “most of the times we end up here.”

And he hates her. He hates her as much as she hates him, as much as she can’t help being _her_ , as much as she has to keep her hands curled around her knees to stop herself from doing something very, very, very bad.

“We don’t have to,” Caroline says quietly. “End up here, I mean. We don’t have to end up anywhere. We could just be.”

“So here we are, love. Just being.” He toasts to that, brings his glass to his lips, downs it all in one go. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t come to the wedding. I’m sure your gift will arrive in one piece —Rebekah’s been of better temperament lately.”

“Klaus—”

“No, don’t—it’s very sweet of you, Caroline. Dear Caroline. _Darling_ Caroline. Everyone’s sweetheart.” Klaus stands, he towers, he stretches his thousand-year-old limbs and she has never felt so small in her life to be in the way of his erupted fury. “How long would it have lasted, anyway? I made a promise, I made a baby, then _you_ made two, and – what – we both lost them, and now I’m to lose you. This is the way it always ends up: I’m drunk, you’re stuck, we’re in love, and then we are not.” Klaus finishes ticking off his fingers, and he seems to have forgotten where he is completely, because he strides up to where she’s sitting, and he gets down on his goddamn knees, and he – he almost touches her.

But he won’t touch her, so long as she isn’t his to touch. This much is painfully true, so all he can do is look, and all she can do is feel.

He kneels there for a long time, not saying a thing, studying her like a map to be charted. He will ever stop looking at her this way: searching, feeling the air with his fingers.

And all at once, it’s too much.

“Klaus,” she says, slowly, like she’s trying to remember him, “you’re hurting me.”

“But I haven’t once touched you.”

She averts her gaze. “You know what I mean.”

It’s almost like a reflex, his wince – probably remembering his teeth in her throat, once, and she tries not to remember how he’d taken a secret pull of her blood before everything faded to black. Klaus swallows, his jaw clenches. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“I’m not talking about hands, Klaus,” Caroline says carefully. She bites down on her lip, but forges on. “Some things aren’t… physical.”

Klaus’ intake of breath is almost inaudible, if she hasn’t been so trained in the study of him – his body, his responses, his voice. Klaus likes to think he’s the only one who takes notice of her tells, but between the two of them, she’s always been more subtle with how she feels.

“Some things aren’t physical,” Klaus repeats. His face is inscrutable suddenly. It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking. “Some things. Aren’t physical.”

“That’s what I said.”

“ _Some things aren’t physical?”_

Mercurial by nature, isn’t he, Klaus? Never predictable. One moment he’s kneeling before her looking for all the world like he might confess a big, troubling sin; the next his eyes are yellow-gold with whatever emotion that has taken him.

His tongue darts out to wet his lips, he exhales through his nose, loudly. “You covered our connection with hostility, you reviled me at every turn even as you undressed me with your eyes, and you dare come to me _now_ and say some things aren’t _physical?_ What does that mean? What does that fucking mean?”

“It means— I— I don’t have to explain it to you! And you, before — You didn’t have to let the whole town know how you felt for me – you think it was some fucking trophy that I was the only person you wouldn’t kill? Or wouldn’t kill _for_?” Caroline fires back with cheeks red, emboldened by alcohol and grief. “You think it I was supposed to feel so special, that I was the only person you wouldn’t touch?”

“I’d be _damned_ if you felt anything at all, love,” he retorts. “Then perhaps all my pain wouldn’t have been for naught.”

“Pain?” she laughs once, cold and humourless. “I guess you know what you’re talking about, since you were always inflicting it on us.”

“Is this the purpose of your visit then, to crucify me for my past?”

“Would that shock you if it was?”

“Sweetheart, may I ask, respectfully, what you’re doing here?” The anger in his voice is apparent now, where it had just been a glimmer before. He still has not moved from his position. He is still looking up at her, eyes muted with fury: he is always the most unreadable when he is like this. “Not getting cold feet now, are you?”

It’s mean, as mean as Klaus can be with her, to invoke some sort of reaction.

Caroline knows how this goes – knows how it _should_ go. She should scoff. Say something vindictive, something vague, turn away – that’s her safety blanket, the only thing that keeps Klaus at bay. The push and the pull, the lure and the trap. But she finds her response stilted on her tongue, unable to say a word, and the longer the silence stretches the more the room changes.

Caroline—Caroline is afraid. And Klaus—

Klaus looks up at her, eyes wide in wonder, lips parting slowly—

“Caroline.”

II.

She’s locked herself up in the guest room, pacing restlessly, wearing holes in his expensive carpet. Klaus is on the other side of the door, without a doubt – she can smell blood and bourbon, fear and anticipation, a heart pounding.

Two hearts, she realizes, hand to her own chest.

“May I come in?” he asks, and she realizes it’s because she must have stopped pacing.

She scratches her fingers through her hair and drops down onto the bed, presses her forehead to her knees. “No.”

She hears him sigh through the door. “Caroline.”

“I didn’t come here to be talked out of my wedding.” There is something wet and building and hot and welling in the centre of her chest, a heaviness she cannot yet place, an eagerness to put her head down on the pillow and sleep it all away. Her voice is too insistent. Overcompensation. “That’s _not_ why I came.”

“Can I venture a guess, then?”

Caroline lifts her head from her knees and bites her lower lip. “I don’t know. I’m afraid you might be right.”

Silence on his end. Caroline pricks her ears up; she can hardly hear him breathing now.

And then:

“You should go home.”

She’s so selfish. She’s so selfish and _stupid_ , she lifts her head and she asks, very quietly: “Why?”

“You can’t stay here, Caroline.”

“Just to clarify, I’m – I’m not, this is just a visit—”

“You’re never as transparent as when you _lie_ to me,” Klaus snarls. The threat of it muffled by old, polished wood. She wonders faintly how long he’s stayed here.

She finds her breath. “I’m not lying to you.”

“I thought you respected me more than that.”

“I do.”

“Then why won’t you leave?”

Caroline narrows her eyes. The wretchedness that had gripped her heart cold evaporates, and suddenly she is crossing the room in great strides and yanking the door open, curious and demanding. “You want me to go? And why’s that?”

Klaus leans into the doorway but she stands her ground. There is an inquisitive light to his face, but it doesn’t make him look any less frightening. “Because, sweetheart, you don’t belong here.”

Dread settles in her like a stone, and it must show on her face, because there is the most miniscule of pauses on Klaus’s end before he marches on: “You belong back home in your perfect little white-picket fantasy with your 2.5 children and Spot the dog; perfect, chivalrous fiancé who smells like the honey and flapjacks he surprises you with every morning. He will never smell like blood – like me, because that’s not who you are now, is it? You want nothing to do with all the murder and madness that comes with this kind of life.” Klaus, quite finished now with his diatribe, takes a smug step back. Caroline regards him silently, a strange sort of quiet settling inside her, growing stranger when Klaus asks: “Am I wrong, then?”

And here is when Caroline realizes: “Yes. You’re wrong.”

“Then you’re not afraid anymore.”

“I was never afraid,” she lies to his face, which falters just the slightest.

“Caroline, love,” he sighs, and almost places his hands on her cheeks. His hands then move for her shoulders, and then settling in the air between them, before dropping back to his sides. She wonders if he realizes he’s clenched them into fists. “You’re foolish when you’re in love. And you do love him. More than you could ever love me.”

Resolve melts in her stomach. If she did truly love her fiancé, why is she in Paris? Why is she in the arms of a murderer, manipulator, master puppeteer? Why does she not feel as wretched as she should to be putting her phone on airplane mode?

“But I … ” She closes her eyes and bites down on her lip. “Despite everything. There’s history – and there’s—” Caroline grapples for words for a while. Soon enough she realises she doesn’t have them, or maybe not the ones that satisfy her truly.

Klaus just waits, looking at her all the while.

“There is a place,” Caroline begins, swallowing wetly, “that exists when you and I meet, where, despite all odds, things make sense.”

“It’ll be enough for me, sweetheart,” Klaus smiles sadly. “But it won’t be enough for you. Now, go. You can take my jet if you like.”

There’s something watery about her smile. She’s foolish enough to admit it to herself. “This is probably the last time I’ll ever see you.”

“And you’ll be – fuck, Caroline.” Klaus takes a step back and pinches the bridge of his nose. He sounds in pain, a string of curses in a language foreign to her escaping in a single breath before he regains composure. “You’ll be better off for it.”

The worst part of it was: she wasn’t sure that was entirely true.

As if she couldn’t hate herself enough, as if she couldn’t possibly feel like the worst kind of _thing_ that ever existed.

“Could you just humour me one final thing? I couldn’t – I don’t think I’d be able to move past this, not knowing what you meant.” Klaus inhales sharply. “What did you mean when you said some things aren’t physical?”

The smile she gives him is rueful. “I really have to spell it out for you, huh?”

“I’m afraid I really don’t know what you mean, sweetheart.”

“Nobody touches me like you do,” Caroline admits her oldest, most terrible secret to him. Softly, as if the air between them was too fragile to bear anything louder than a whisper. “I’m not speaking about hands.”

Klaus exhales. Slowly.

“There you go,” she says, and – _oh_ , she can’t even look at him. “Think you could make peace with that?”

“You move me, Caroline,” Klaus laughs quietly. “I move for no one and for you I would move mountains if I heard you call my name. I cannot – I cannot just stand here, with you so close, and not be holding you the way you’ve needed someone to hold you. Tell me, love – when was the last time you felt held?”

The question shakes her.

For a few moments there is only silence whilst she collects her thoughts, her wits, her guts, her truths.

The answer comes to her with sudden clarity, with a strange finality.

When was the last time she felt held, he asked?

“The forest,” she whispers. A tear slips down her cheek.

—

Klaus searches her eyes. “Stay, then. Give me one more day.”

He astounds her, really, he does. Over and over and over again – she hasn’t realised that she’d been starved for this of intimacy, this strange courtship only he could offer; she shouldn’t be _only_ realising this now.

Hadn’t she been fending him off all this while?

“Am I not the one who’s supposed to be asking that?”

—

“Caroline, my love,” Klaus mourns after a full day of doing nothing but eating pastries and drinking blood, “I’m trying very hard not to flatter myself, but why did you _come?_ ”

She tilts her head and considers her answer.

(The day she tries on her wedding gown is the day she finally succumbs to the full extent of her tears. The sobs are loud and ugly, and it startles Bonnie, who almost drops her champagne flute.

It’s Caroline who drops instead.

She holds her chest, tries to hold in the ache that’s been suffocating her for months, tries to push her limp heart back into position. She almost tears through the lace covering her bodice. It’s all wrong. Her dress has sleeves, she hadn’t _wanted_ sleeves, why had she agreed to sleeves?

Stefan had been there for the earlier fittings. They were fooling around, laughing, a little buzzed from the champagne. He’d piled her with tulle and lace and whatever other layer he could get his hands on. She’d ended up in a Cinderella monstrosity, a terrible cliché of a Disney dress, and they’d _cried_ from laughter. When they finally gathered themselves, he had come up behind her, kissed her _so_ softly on her shoulder, and told her she looked beautiful.

She’d kept the sleeves because of that.

“They’re too long,” she wails, flapping her arms.

Elena wraps gentle arms around her. “We’ll get them fixed. We’ve got so much time, Care – oh, Care, why are you crying?”

“Because it’s all,” Caroline gasps for breath, her face is red as Bonnie goes to tell the attendants to leave them be, “ _wrong_.”

“Should we call Stefan?” Elena asks. “He always knows what to say.”

Caroline shakes her head. He’s the last person she wants to see in her condition, she’s such a liar, a coward. “I’ve got a feeble, fickle heart,” she whispers wretchedly into Elena’s shoulder.

Elena soothes her, shushes her, and seems uncaring that there’s a dampness seeping through her sweater.

“So do the rest of us. Look how far we’ve flown.” She starts rocking Caroline slowly.

“I don’t deserve you two.”

Bonnie steps back into the room, watching the scene with worry. Caroline is all but wrapped up in Elena, or the other way around. Underneath all that fabric it was really hard to tell.

“Nobody deserves anything,” Bonnie says firmly. She goes down with the two of them, and they lay in a crumpled heap of Caroline’s white layers. “The need for _that_ kind of validation? It’s too much pressure.”

Caroline whimpers.

Bonnie silently passes her one of the discarded flutes of champagne, and Caroline drinks it all only after much coaxing from her friends. They stroke her hair, and wipe her tears away. Still rocking her.

“You’re not in love with him,” Elena ventures a guess.

“No, I am,” Caroline whispers and hides her wet, sticky face in shame. She’s terrible. Cruel. Fickle. Things she had only silently accused Elena of so many years ago. She’s a hypocrite. “I just – my heart is split in two.”

The understanding that settles on her friends’ faces is instantaneous. And then it’s pain, because they aren’t just feeling what Caroline is feeling in addition to their own turmoil, but adding to the dread of Stefan’s inevitable heartbreak as well.

Finally, after a long silence, Elena asks, “Do you want to call it off?”

Caroline just cries harder.)

“I wasn’t really thinking when I bought my plane ticket,” she says. At least there’s some truth in that.

—

“That could’ve been me, you know,” Klaus says conversationally on her last night. He’s drunk again. She tries not to be, but with only his baleful, tragic company to amuse her, she’d found herself getting deeper into her own cups.

“Could it, really?” she laughs. “I find it alarming that you think yourself husband material. Would you be a good one?”

“I’d rather not get too ahead of myself,” Klaus admits ruefully, but then he turns his gaze upwards, looking into her eyes. “But I could be. For you.”

 _For you_ , Caroline repeats in her head. There it was again: the lure. She would not be trapped. But then, her deceitful mind wanders…

The blood-mixed liquor emboldens her. “What makes you think that?”

There it is. The opening he’s been waiting for. Caroline almost curses herself.

Klaus leans forward in his armchair, takes a breath, and quickly wets his lips. She has long known that to be a reflex of Klaus’ especially when nervous, planning. He’d run up the streets screaming her name once, bloodied and hoarse, and even with all the red on his face his lips remained clean.

So clean that by the time Klaus had pulled her out of the rubble that was once the Lockwood Manor, she’d clawed onto him just as desperately, and kissed him with everything that was left in her.

But that was Mystic Falls. Years and years and years ago.

Her lungs full of blood. Her womb, empty.

Kai Parker standing over the body of his dead, withered twin sister.

This is here, now.

Klaus doesn’t say _I’d kill for you_ , because she already knew that.

Klaus doesn’t say, _I’d die for you_ , because he’s yet to prove that.

Instead, Klaus sighs something like a curse in a language she doesn’t recognise, sets his drink onto the coffee table with a sharp click, and says, almost like a prayer: “I would repent for you.”

III.

The wedding is called off.

People leave her alone in her silence after a beat of concern. No more flowers, no more gifts, no more well wishes, no more microwavable casseroles – just silence. The rain beats down onto the roof of the Salvatore Boarding House, and Caroline can’t stop looking out the window, drowning in her wedding dress. Stefan looks like he’s being held up by his stiff tuxedo.

Lightning splinters across the angry sky as if punctuating the confession Caroline had just revealed to him.

He stands by the fireplace, studying her in silence.

There’s not much fanfare to be felt in heartbreak.

And she did so break Stefan. He asks her if he’s done anything wrong. If it was Damon. If it was Cade. He’d stop his crusade for her, he’d stop everything. He’s walked up to her now, swift and sorry, cupping her face so gently.

Caroline can only shake her head, tries to pull his hands away, but Stefan stands his ground. She tells him she doesn’t deserve his touch, but still Stefan stands there.

“It’s not any of that – it’s not … anything you did. I just don’t love you as I should,” Caroline just replies sadly.

“I don’t need that,” Stefan says quickly, like he’s so _sure_ , and what the fuck, no. Everybody needs that. _Everybody_.

“Stefan,” she says, clawing at his shoulders, “I’m sorry. I’m so, sorry. I can’t love you the way you deserve, the way everybody _needs_. And don’t give me that martyr bullshit because it’s not on you to beg for me. Nobody has to beg to be loved. Love is choosing, and I tried to choose you, but it’s been so hard – I lost – I lost,” she crumbles. “I lost Lizzie and Josie.”

Stefan holds her and shushes her. “Care, I love you. You’re not alone in your grief.”

“But I am,” she cries. “I was their mother. And I let them die.”

Stefan’s eyes are very red now. “Caroline, don’t say that, please.”

“Last week I didn’t go to a business meeting,” Caroline says, scratching her tears away from her cheeks. “I have to tell you now. I didn’t go to Paris for work.”

Stefan thins his lips; his shoulders stiffen as she strengthens her resolve and says, “Klaus –”

“Was there,” he finishes for her. “I know, Caroline.”

“How?”

He smiles at her but it doesn’t meet his eyes. “You smelled like him even after you showered.”

Her eyes fill up with yet more tears. Of course, of course he had known, and of course he hadn’t said _anything_ – so unlike Klaus, who would have murdered the nearest person standing if he’d ever caught her smelling of another man. Another monster.

And Stefan, damn him, he actually wraps his hands around her shoulders, like he’s reassuring her, “It’s hard to keep Klaus from flaking off of you, isn’t he? Not when he’s drenched with so many years of blood. I’ve been there. God have I been there.”

“ _Stefan_ ,” is all she can say.

He breathes out a sigh. It’s long and shaky. “I tried to convince myself that you could forget him. For a while you seemed to. But he’s in your skin, isn’t he?”

She nods.

He smiles, so, so softly, and rubs a knuckle into her wet cheek. “That’s what you get for being in denial for so long, stupid.”

“Don’t call me stupid,” she sniffles. “Even if it’s true.”

“You’re beautiful, Caroline,” Stefan says simply. “I’m sure you know that. It’s one thing about you that’s always gonna be the same.”

She lowers her gaze. She knows.

Her beauty will never fade and she’ll never die.

She’d accepted a lot of things the minute vampires came to town. Loss, she’d come to learn, was inevitable.

Caroline has accepted that fact, but not even her mother’s death had prepared her for such loss when her babies were ripped from her womb.

Kai Parker had taken away the hope she’d thought was impossible, long buried under blood and teeth. Kai Parker had taken everything from her.

Alaric had allowed her to slice his head off. Bonnie had smiled when she kicked his head into the gutter, spread bits of him around town. She shouldn’t have derived such pleasure from the sight, but she wasn’t human anymore. She was allowed.

She looks at Stefan. That’s something he’ll never understand.

He looks back, resigned, and kisses her temple. “I’ll always love you. I’ll always be here. Maybe as a friend – maybe… maybe more. But you know where to find me.”

Caroline’s shoulders shudder. Why did she have to love such a good man? “You’ll always be a friend to me.”

Stefan doesn’t wince, but he looks like he almost would. “I know that. Now go.”

She’d like to say she stays, offer some words of solace, try to find some kind of closure, but Stefan looks like he’d very much like to start drowning himself in bourbon, so she leaves.

And she hates to be so predictable, but driving around Mystic Falls, her car filled to the brim with her bridal layers makes going home feel absolutely suffocating – the thought of an empty house waiting for her, no mother, no comfort, not even any blood bags.

She hates to be so predictable, but she ends up at the Mikaelson Mansion all the way at the edge of town. It’s been abandoned for years, but she breaks the lock and trails line through the grime heavy on the marble floor with her exaggerated train.

The mansion feels even more imposing than it ever did all those years ago. Furniture covered in white drapes greet her like ghosts. She pulls one down in a plume of dust to reveal that huge floor-to-ceiling mirror that stood in the grand foyer, and she studies herself.

Her almost shapeless silhouette and starts making quick work of the excess layers, tearing them off.

It takes a lot of effort for her to gather her skirts up to rip off her garters in one pull – _blue_.

She untangles her veil from her once-elegant chignon, now a mess of limp curls, trying not to remember the way Elena had looked at her when she’d pulled it down over her face, crooning sweetly, _Something new._

Bonnie had lent her the pins she’d used to put up her hair; an old Bennett heirloom that was supposed to bless brides on their wedding day.

She had rooted through her jewellery box for something old, when her fingers had found Klaus’ bracelet.

The fact that she had even considered wearing it shattered something inside her.

Leaving the bracelet on her vanity she’d gone to find Stefan immediately.

Elena and Bonnie didn’t need to be told to start instructing the guests to go home.

And now here she was, deconstructing her wedding dress in Klaus’ house of all places, one layer at a time.

When she’s done, she’s going to box up her wedding dress and bury it next to her mother’s grave.

A noise behind her stops her in the middle of tugging at the pearls that scattered as if without motif down her abdomen.

Through the mirror she sees the reflection of shiny Italian dress shoes at the top of the grand staircase behind her and she whirls around as quickly as her dress allowed.

Klaus is staring down at her, dressed in the sharpest suit she’s ever seen, in the middle of undoing his bowtie one-handed. His other hand is holding a glass tumbler of something she suspects is liquor of the hard and disgusting brand.

“Did you go?” she asks, startled.

“No,” he says, slowly. He goes down the stairs, one step at a time, and then stops at the landing. He looks her up and down. “Did you?”

**Author's Note:**

> it ends where it ends, folks!
> 
> lyn, mels & deej - I DID WARN YOU


End file.
